How did you come up with your username? Why did you choose it?

[byrdseed]

Growing up, I had a multitude of vocal stims. When I was 7 or so, I took great pleasure in saying the word "birdseed" with an "eee" sound, a rolled "R", and a soft "D", so that it sounded like "biarrdhseed" or "beardseed" (gross approximation). I found it absolutely hilarious, to the point where it became my username and/or password of choice for a bunch of websites and online kids' games. I'd always spelled it "byrdseed", and over time, the screen name just stuck. I've never felt the urge to change it - I quite like "byrdseed". Though when I introduce myself by saying "I'm Byrd, and I like birds", it does make me feel like a cartoon character sometimes. I'm a parody of myself.

Nowadays, most people pronounce it "birdseed" with the nickname Byrd being pronounced the same as the word "bird", and I'm fine with that. Though if my seven-year-old self were to have it his way, he'd pronounce it "beard". I think it's a little silly.

[niko]

My username is... my name! I'm really surprised no one had claimed it yet

[MediocreMetastasis]

Wanted a 2 worded username with alliteration when publishing my first game, thought of metastasis because meta/metaverse was a buzz word at that time then I thought mediocre which kinda match my non-serious tone.

[Semper]

When I first made an account on Neocities, I was going to call my site Sempervivum (like the genus of plant) but instead opted for Mycorrhiza. I still liked the name Sempervivum and use it around other online spaces I lurk (though altered somewhat) and I shorten it to Semper when I join forums. I like it, it has grown on me, not unlike a sempervivum, the always living plant.

[bennizone]

I use this username most places!   My middle-name is Bernadette, my nickname is Benni. So naturally, if I'm Benni, then my zone would be... THE BENNIZONE 

[sirenkidu]

its pretty goofy but i just took the words "sir" and "enkidu" together. Enkidu is a character in this Epic of Gilgamesh and I like how it sounds, so I just decided to use that. Makes no sense but its whatever, i dont really plan to market myself with this username anyway :p

[Spaloupu]

Just got it out of what is pretty much a made up word generator
Fantasy Animal Names

[bodypoetic]

About five or six years ago, I was starting to get a couple of poems published in literary magazines - and at the time, Twitter was the main place poets and lit mags congregated and shared work/open calls (no idea if this is still the case). Only I was still using the Twitter account I'd gotten back in high school, with a lot of mildly embarrassing history attached to it if anyone decided to go digging that far back. So I made a new Twitter account specifically for sharing my writing, and took about ten seconds to come up with a username for it - bodypoetic, because (a) the body is a longstanding artistic fixation of mine, (b) it's an account for sharing my poetry, and (c) it's a pun on body politic. When I made my itch.io account, I gave it the same username for consistency and whoops, now this dumb joke I came up with is a semi-professional pseudonym.

[juanp32]

mine is quite unoriginal
literally my name + the first letter of my first surname + 32 because system32 lol (if already taken then 32 is replaced by any other power of 2)

i mean i know this is a short post and a bit underwhelming but its literally all thats it for this username

my other handles ive had are also a bit uhhhhhhhhhh:
- ihatesegfaults: self explanatory, i hate segfaults
- serverman: dumb injoke with some friends, there isnt much to explain here
- dos_user: because my older pc had a ms-dos partition lol
- formatdrivec: another reference to win and dos: `format c: x` where x can be any arguments (other than the drive volume) defined in `help format`

[magicalgurll]

it's of course a joke about "magical girl" because my general extremely feminine, peppy, frilly, sparkly energy and style match with what you would expect to see out of the magical girl genre!!! and then my last name is literally just "gurll" so this was really the only choice

[Waap.]

Waap is child me's written impression of a trumpet or trombone sound. We would write "Waap." all over our school books as like a signature or catchphrase alongside drawings of our sona (though we didn't know what a sona was at the time), which was a three-eyed anthropomorphic pea with a blank expression and a Kirby-like body (we also didn't know what Kirby was). 

[AbsurdPirate]

I had finished reading "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus, and identified with absurdist philosophy. I also just have had "pirate" somewhere in my usernames for quite a while.

So I combined the absurd and my pirate username, and there we have it. 

[juette]

its my online name :-) i dont really remember where i found it but i like how it sounds and it feels like me. also its unique enough that i can use it as a username on most platforms

ive been looking for another name to change my legal name to but i cant find one i vibe with as much but i dont want juette to be my legal name either

[HisVirusness]

One of my father's favorite bands is the Reverend Horton Heat. Jim Heath was given that as a nickname from the owner of the nightclub he first played at, so when he started a band, that became their name. My father, correctly figuring I was going to get into performing arts, always told me you didn't give yourself a stage name, and he'd use that as his prime example.

Years later, I was doing stand up comedy on the northside of Chicago, and became a regular at a couple of open mics and showcases. One of the bookers would introduce me as "The Virus", inspired by a tattoo I have, and also because I was unnecessarily loud and abrasive on stage. I just embraced it, and "HisVirusness" became my online moniker that didn't incorporate numbers or contain my initials.

[Dan Q]

I've used a lot of usernames over the years. Probably the first one, which I used to use on BBSes in the early 90s, was "Diceman". Like the George Cockcroft (Luke Rhinehart) book, but in my case it was a school nickname because back then I collected dice.

Much later I became "Scatman Dan" in many circles, after Scatman John, after some new friends from university discovered that I knew all of Scatman John's lyrics by heart.

But by the time you've shed your anonymity online, the horse has already bolted and there's little use shutting the stable door. So nowadays, I just go by my real, full name basically everywhere. If you see a "Dan Q"... it's probably me... or else some annoying Dan Quayle or Dan Quigley or similarly-named person who's chosen to use just the initial of their surname with no regard for those of me whose surname only has a single character in the first place, grr.

Upside: I'm very easy to find, because my name is short and unique. Downside: the same thing.

tl;dr: it's my actual name